Survey: what do you do with Squeak, what do you *want* to do?

>
>     What would you like to be able to use Squeak for?
>
>
> Everything I'm using Cuis for.
>

Would you tell us what you are using Cuis for?

Stef

On 21/02/2018, 22:36, "tim Rowledge" <[hidden email]> wrote:

> At the latest board meeting we got to discussing the relative quietness of the
> squeak list(s) recently. We were wondering what you folks out there are doing
> with Squeak, what you'd like to be able to use it for, the things that you
> think would be important to improve it for wider use and so on.

Please,
> whether you're a frequent user or an occasional look-at-the-list type, take a
> moment to let us know your opinions.



Glad to see Board throw this


>What do you use Squeak for?


I use Squeak and Cuis derived .image for learning .

Right now I have a Kom + HV + lots of external HTML5 + CSS + JavaScript
Divagaciones.29.image at www.squeakros.org

Log with user 'visita' and without pass

Inside is a experimental thing combining wiki + blog and many Web 2.0 more.

Synch with official wiki daily and in Spanish what I put there.

Powered by Ubuntu Mate and Debian Ian Stack VM running in this
http://190.193.176.228:9090/renderMe:SRS026%20Endeavour
Click on first pict and you could see how you could have your cheap own
cloud with old hardware

Also investigating WebAssembly and cooking a WasmLivingBook.image
Any wishing know more send mail and I send link to our "BarSqueakRos" ,
currently on Discord


>What does Squeak lack

From Andreas Raab lost , we miss a unquestionable leader as Pharo have and
off course Cuis.
Now we have a Board with veterans and young's, so still I have hope.
Hope releases have a plan.
How we know 6.0 is finished if we don't know the road map ?
Quality control, please.
Test is not enough, .image needs first hand use


Edgar
@morplenauta




>
tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email];
> http://www.rowledge.org/tim
C for sinking, java for drinking, Smalltalk for
> thinking

CONTENTS DELETED

Sorry being late here, but my answers, trying to add my 2 cents.

> What do you use Squeak for?

Not using it currently, but I've several legacy projects, that got outdated
unfortunately.

> If you don't use Squeak, why not?
> If you used Squeak in the past and don't now, what pulled you away?
> What does Squeak lack that you think might make you use it for 'regular'
> development?

I abandoned it to develop professional desktop applications, for a lot of
reasons:

1. Not a decent UI that the regular common users can feel as in home.
2. The damn single window metaphor.
3. The lack of good integration with the operating systems.
4. Tha lack of good/easy integration with libraries in other languages.
5. Tha lack of must-be native code in areas as cryptography for example.
6. I never understood why excellent pieces of code (as Morphic UI Builder
for example) never has been included in the base image (I wrote about this
in this same list).
7. The always present inestability between releases, being very hard to move
your project to a new image version.
8. The lack of ways to generate native executables versions of my
applications to different operating systems.

to mention the most significative reasons that comes to my mind right now.
May be some of my points have changed with the time, I'm not using Squeak
from some years.

> What things are too hard or annoying to do?

Try to compete (I mean sell your app against the competence written in any
common language that have a normal UI and integration with the operating
system) with Squeak and you will undestand that is an impossible.


I had to develop my password manager in Dolphin, because I wouldn't have
sold a single licenses if I were attempted with Squeak.


> What would you like to be able to use Squeak for?


I always dream with a Smalltalk environment that permit me work
professionally in any operating system (includind mobile) but also I
understand that this is an open source project with no funds and is not easy
to make great things with no money involved.

Please, do not take my words as a criticism, but you asked and I answer with
honestity.



--
Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Squeak-Dev-f45488.html

garduino wrote
Sorry for the several typos, writing with few ligth and my tired eyes made
the conjunction :)



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Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Squeak-Dev-f45488.html

Tim Rowledge wrote on Wed, 21 Feb 2018 17:36:01 -0800
> What do you use Squeak for?

I am using Celeste in Squeak to reply to this email.

Many of my presentations have used Squeak.

Squeak is a key technology in my projects (the SiliconSqueak processor)
including for most of my simulations

Since I always have a window open with Squeak for email, I often use it
as a calculator for more complicated things (I use an actual calculator
for simple things and LibreOffice spreadsheets for really complicated
things).

> If you don't use Squeak, why not?
> If you used Squeak in the past and don't now, what pulled you away?

I like many languages including other Smalltalks. Though I am very
interested in Cuis I never used it because some of the things that were
ripped out were stuff I used in my presentations. Once I had a short
deadline for a presentation and downloaded the latest Squeak on a new
laptop but found that thumbnails had been broken. The fix was trivial,
but I ended up doing the presentation in Prezi since I couldn't risk
running into more problems. More recently stupid OS security
restrictions in running Squeak off a USB pen drive have made me do
presentations in PDF instead.

But the truth is that Self is my favorite Smalltalk for technical
reasons and the Squeak community is the reason for me using that. And
one aspect of that community for a long time was the leadership of the
PARC people - very much like a reunion of the favorite band from your
childhood. That put Squeak along with VisualWorks in a special place
among all Smalltalks and we lost a bit of that after Squeak 3.2. The
split with Pharo and Cuis certainly changed the community somewhat, but
I think this was a good opportunity for Squeak to be more strongly
commited to Etoys, which took a long while but eventually has mostly
happened.

> What does Squeak lack that you think might make you use it for 'regular' development?

Modularity needs to be improved. It should be possible to start really
small and as transparently as possible use anything out there. Right now
we start big and have too much trouble loading extra stuff. And given
that we don't have computers with just a few MB of RAM anymore it is
silly to have to manage separate .source and .changes files. I think
these two issues are related.

> What things are too hard or annoying to do?

Obviously writing class comments?

> What would you like to be able to use Squeak for?

Run stuff like Frank, Croquet and so on all at the same time instead of
as separate images.

-- Jecel

Well, we had about 30 replies on this so far and I'd love to read more. Who else can tell us fun stuff?

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
From C:\*.* to shining C:\*.*

Hi all,

First note: My Squeak contribution is very limited (/can be rounded to
zero), so I'm actually not allowed to criticize:)

Q-What do you use Squeak for?

Used it since it became available in 1996. At that time, afaik, it was
the only open source Smalltalk distribution and it was great,
especially while enjoying Smalltalk books as "Inside Smalltalk" and
the "Smalltalk-80 series", Design Patterns (Gamma e.d.) and
Smalltalk's best practice patterns (Kent Beck). Used it professionally
around 1998-2000, when we tried to build & commercialize some
multimedia "sharing/editing" tool for children. Long story short: this
failed. Not because of technical reasons,  we were just young and
naive. Currently, I'm only using it sporadically for small hobby
projects and e.g. to learn from graphics/music/network libraries.

Q-If you don't use Squeak, why not?

Lack of source code management / package configuration mgmt /
modularity / stability / speed (at least that was the state in 2000).

Q-If you used Squeak in the past and don't now, what pulled you away?

Again, lack of source code management / package configuration mgmt /
stability / modularity / speed.

We (ag5.com) are currently working with around 10 developers. Working
with a group of developers wasn't well supported in Squeak. So we
moved to VisualWorks around 2001. At that time we also moved our
company's product focus to corporate planning systems. So Squeak's
multi-media features became less valuable for us. (And eventually, we
also changed our company's name from Cosmocows to AG5).

Q-What does Squeak lack that you think might make you use it for
'regular' development?

Not sure what is the exact current state and how squeak progressed in
the areas I mentioned above. But, over the years, there seem to have
been several interesting initiatives like Newspeak (e.g. modularity
with inner class concept) or related research projects from HPI
Potsdam. But I've no practical experience with these initiatives, only
from reading papers and/or a bit of playing.

Q-What things are too hard or annoying to do?

Again: source code management / package configuration mgmt /
modularity / stability / speed.

Some initiatives in this area seem to have failed, e.g. Squeak had
several Namespace implementation initiatives, none made it into real
production, afaik. Integrating with Source code management systems
like Git, while keeping the power of the Smalltalk image concept,
seems to be hard too.

But others initiatives seem to have success, e.g. the
opensmalltalk-vm. Even a success in 2 ways: the improved collaboration
infrastructure (git/travis) and, of course, the VM performance itself.
In some benchmarks, it should even outperform VW, but VW's virtual
machine performance is, for us, fast enough (/not the performance
bottleneck).
MIT's Scratch has also been a success for Squeak in this area: an
infrastructure where 1000s of children can share their projects; view
& load & try & review projects from some open repository and it all
seems to work. (ps. without that I knew, even my daughter started to
use it during some school event in Berlin this year. And when she came
home, she showed me her work online: a pink horse jumping over hay
bales. Amazing.)
Something like this is not possible for general Smalltalk programmers,
whatever st distribution, and certainly not between the different st
distributions.

Testing framework SUnit is probably the most successful Smalltalk code
in history. (successful in the sense of having succeeders/followers).
Still using it almost daily, and it helps to stabilize and share our
code. (when I want to understand code from others, I often start
reading their test cases).

With Monticello and Metacello I've no real practical experience, no
opinion. Played with it a few years back, but at that time it was
still immature. Nowadays it seems to be used a lot, so probably as
good as VW's store for source code mgmt.

Q-What would you like to be able to use Squeak for?

To develop and run the server part of our web-based "Business"
products. Our 2 products: an online ERP system for Dutch
Fire-departments and a Skills management system for Manufactures, are
continuously developed & integrated & deployed and run by a
multidisciplinary team of developers, designers, operators and
business analysts.

However, I don't see how a switch to Squeak could (financially) pay
off. And maybe even more important, most of my (younger) colleagues
are enthusiastic python/javascript/swift programmers, they are not
hooked on Smalltalk as I do.

====

Not really answering one of the questions above, but some general
thoughts about our tools landscape and if/where Squeak could fit in:

VisualWorks is still more practical for us than Squeak. It offers a
pretty stable & fast core, their 64bit VM is running stable in
production for us for several years now (we host 200+ images), and
their source code management system "Store" is more or less working
for us (we tuned it to our needs). We do not use much of Cincom's
"add-on libraries" e.g. we don't use their ORM/Glorp nor any of their
web server/frameworks nor tools the UI painter. We do not need their
customer support often, but when we need them, they always are very
helpful and able to fix bugs.

Currently, half of our developers are programming in other languages
than Smalltalk, especially for the client-side of our product.
Web-client stuff with Javascript/HTML/CSS, native apps with Java &
Swift. For all kind of system administration automation, we use Python
(including Amazon's AWS scripting).

We also work with freelance interaction & visual designers; they are
familiar with HTML/CSS/Js and it is much more efficient when
developers and designers have some common tooling.

In the past, we used a "Model-Driven Design" (MDD) approach. Which
meant, in Smalltalk, we "described a high-level domain model", and
from this model, all other system parts/layers were automatically
generated (including parts in other programming languages). A few
years back we moved away from this strategy to develop directly in
those other languages, to get higher product quality, especially in
the "User eXperience" part. At the cost of Smalltalk and of
programming productivity.

For me personally, Squeak is "good enough", it's fun and a source of
inspiration. But for a company with several developers working on a
product with "web- and app clients", Squeak needs better source code
management (/git), package configuration mgmt and modularity, so it
can better embed into the multi-language workflow of our team of
developers, designers. But this "management overhead" would probably
make it less attractive for personal hobby use. A dilemma the
community should solve:)

To repeat my first note: My Squeak contribution is very limited (/can
be rounded to zero), so I'm actually not allowed to criticize. Here a
complete overview of my limited contributions:
- Every year I vote in the board elections. That is another thing I
very much like about Squeak: the community is democratic, and the
yearly elected board seems to be a team of smart and friendly people.
- and I like to attend the yearly Squeak e.V. Treffen (/meeting) at
HPI in Potsdam Germany, to give a short presentation of our Smalltalk
usage and especially to see others present their interesting Smalltalk
related (research) projects.
- writing this email.

greetings and keep up the good work!

Mathieu van Echtelt

On Tue, Apr 24, 2018 at 9:11 PM, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Well, we had about 30 replies on this so far and I'd love to read more. Who else can tell us fun stuff?
>
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> From C:\*.* to shining C:\*.*
>
>
>



--
AG5
Timorplein 37
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Amsterdam

T  020  4630942
F  020  4630946

On Tue, Apr 24, 2018 at 9:11 PM, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Well, we had about 30 replies on this so far and I'd love to read more. Who else can tell us fun stuff?
>
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> From C:\*.* to shining C:\*.*
>
>
>



--
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www.ag5.com
tel: 0049 (0)30 81828464
mobile: 0049 (0)178-2016515

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Nicolas Cellier wrote
> The growing gap with Pharo is not helping and is really annoying me

+1 but what can be done? The divergence is more and more fundamental e.g.
namespaces are only available on Squeak, stateful Traits/real packages
(RPackage) only on Pharo. For a time, I tried to sync all my projects
between the two, but the effort is exponential, and it wasn't even clear if
there would be users…

The only (unrealistic) solution that ever came to my mind would be a
reunification - why (besides politically and due to personalities) do cuis,
pharo, and squeak have to be independent projects? Now that Pharo is
bootstrapped, couldn't the energy of Cuis to have a small, clean system be
poured into that effort? Could Squeak be a layer on top with all the cool
stuff reimplemented. Well, it's a dream, but maybe fragmentation is just the
way of the world/human beings…



-----
Cheers,
Sean
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